Disclaimer: A Novel

Renée Knight

May 2015 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

“Disclaimer is something special. . . an outstandingly clever and twisty tale that’s been perfectly engineered to make heads spin. This novel’s opening promise of menace is not overstated. Ms. Knight lives up to the initial deal she made with readers and delivers fully. . . . That’s a rare payoff in a genre full of letdowns. Its value can’t be stressed enough.” — Janet Maslin, New York Times

A brilliantly conceived, deeply unsettling psychological thriller about a woman haunted by secrets, the consuming desire for revenge, and the terrible price we pay when we try to hide the truth.

What if you realized the terrifying book you were reading was all about you?

When a mysterious novel appears at documentary filmmaker Catherine Ravenscroft’s bedside, she is curious. She has no idea who might have sent her The Perfect Stranger—or how it ended up on her nightstand. At first, she is intrigued by the suspenseful story that unfolds. And then she realizes this isn’t fiction. The Perfect Stranger re-creates in vivid, unmistakable detail the day Catherine became hostage to a dark secret, a secret that only one other person knew—and that person is dead.

Now that the past Catherine so desperately wants to forget is catching up with her, her world is falling apart. Plunged into a living nightmare, her only hope is to confront what really happened on that awful day . . . even if the shocking truth might destroy her.

Ratings and reviews

A documentary filmmaker, wife and mother finds a novel on a her bedside table without knowing how it got there. As she reads, she can't help but notice simarities to events that occurred earlier in her life. Events she tried to keep secret from her husband for twenty years. She knows that whoever wrote this book had to have been present on the day in question. The story slowly unfolds as we discover who wrote the book, and how it came to be in her home. The focus is on the lives of everyone impacted by the secret event. Information about the secret is revealed slowly and steadily. Each chapter is told from a different character's perspective, and the time jumps back and forth from the present (2013, actually) to 1993, when the event occurred. When the secret is revealed, we watch as the characters attempt to deal with the knowledge of what took place so many years ago. As with books like this, there is a twist that makes everyone re-evaluate what they'veearned. Disclaimer is slow

The characters are not likable at all. It drags on in the beginning too long with no clue as to what's going on. I am unable to stop reading a book once I start it no matter how bad it is, so I finished it. But it was a total waste of my time. One star because it actually had a twist at the end but was mostly just annoying.

A novel about love and hate, living and dying, pain and healing, disillusionment and awakening... The story started out a bit slow for me but by the third or fourth chapter I had trouble putting it down. The twists and turns of this tale were unexpected, welcome, surprising and alarming. I highly recommend this story. Read it slowly. You won't want to miss a word!

About the author

Renée Knight worked for the BBC directing arts documentaries before turning to writing. She has had TV and film scripts commissioned by the BBC, Channel Four, and Capital Films. In April 2013, she graduated from the Faber Academy “Writing a Novel” course, whose alumni include S. J. Watson. She lives in London with her husband and two children.